Looking back, June feels like an awful quiet month, but in reality, a lot has happened. We're only a couple weeks away from beginning the private beta, and lots of the final pieces have fallen right into place.
I worked a little less in June than anticipated because I took a week off to take one last vacation before being chained to Sifter for a while. We went to Colorado, and on our return trip, we had an encounter with a tornado. We're still not sure if it was officially considered a tornado, but it was definitely the scariest thing I've ever encountered. The sunset afterwards was beautiful, but the truck was a little worse for the wear with about $2,200 worth of damage.
The primary goal this month was to get our merchant account up and running, and while it's not officially approved, the application has been fired off. The prerequisites for the merchant account included getting a privacy policy, terms of service, and SSL in place, and we did just that. Again, they're little things that seem trivial, but they sure managed to eat up a lot of time.
Finally, I finished the visual design for the Sifter public site. The markup is complete, and the pages are all built out. Now we just need to add screenshots and screencasts once the app is "finished".
We're almost there. The application itself is feature complete, and I'm now spending the majority of my time testing and polishing for the beta. It's been a long six months, but everything should be publicly available sometime in August.
We’re creating a simple bug and issue tracker named Sifter and blogging about it along the way. We think it’s a great way to get feedback and keep everyone updated on our status.
Grab our feedWe'll only send emails for significant product announcements, and those happen every couple of months at most. Of course, we won't give away or sell your e-mail address either.
Comments
I look forward to seeing the fruits of your labor on this. I appreciate that you pay attention to the little details, and don't rush through things.
I have been following this like a hawk since you first murmured a word about it at GarrettDimon.com. I would love to help out and test the private beta. Good luck and keep on chugging along.
It looks lovely! I'm sure it'll function as well as it looks. Love the logo font. (what is it? :P)
Good luck on the launch. I hope the private betas are not friend only. :P
The font is Serifa BT. As for the beta, the plan is to keep it pretty small and have it a be a true beta instead of a public one. That said, if it starts to last longer than we're anticipating, we'd probably start opening it up little by little.
I remember coming across your site a while back when I was first kicking the tires on SimpleLog, and you were just making the switch... Anyway, I sort of "re-discovered" you recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that you're building Sifter. It's a space that, I think, is still missing the "perfect" app (at least for me), and believe me I've tried my share: Lighthouse, Ticketi.sh, unfuddle, Porchlight, 16bugs, assembla, bugja, goplan, etc. etc.....
So... best of luck getting ready for launch. I look forward to seeing the final product.